Yoda Bets on Strategic Deception to Save the Empire

Webster G. Tarpley
www.tarpley.net
February 2, 2010

Andrew Marshall, the Pentagon’s legendary Yoda, is at it again. The resident futurologist and gray eminence of the US Department of Defense is now 89 years old and has been running Office of Net Assessment for 37 years, since he founded it in 1973. Now comes word that a gaggle of Strangeloves operating under Yoda’s sponsorship is recommending a new array of utopian psychological warfare strategies to try to shore up the sagging US-UK world empire in extremis. These schemes are contained in a report entitled Capability Surprises, which has just been issued under the auspices of the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board. The core recommendation of the assembled Strangeloves is that United States should create and conduct a robust and permanent inter-agency Office of Strategic Deception, to be assembled by a “Tiger team” of utopian think tankers, consultants, and academics, as soon as possible. Capability surprises refer to sudden scientific, technological, or organizational breakthroughs that give one nation a sudden potential strategic advantage over another. They can represent secret weapons, or new ways of organizing existing capabilities, such as the German Blitzkrieg of World War II. Capability surprises, in the opinion of the DSB panel, can be expected for the United States in such areas as cyber warfare, space warfare, military operations, and technology, special emphasis on nuclear and biological capabilities. The report lists the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957 as a capability surprise inflicted by the Soviet Union on the United States. Another shocking surprise for the US came with the Tet offensive in Vietnam of January. Yet another surprise was the widespread use of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in Iraq. The panel thinks that the US attack on Iraq in the form of operation Desert Storm in 1991 represented a capability surprise based on effective deception against Saddam Hussein, whom they however dismiss as an “incompetent victim.” Continue reading Yoda Bets on Strategic Deception to Save the Empire